Earth's Biggest Earthquake

A bigger earthquake than the one that shook Chile in 1960 might have happened once. But Chile's is the biggest ever measured by modern equipment. At magnitude 9.5, the Chilean quake of 1960 shook the earth with the force of more than 100 billion tons of TNT.

Chile has been quaking for ages. It's located on the "Ring of Fire," a zone of dangerous volcanic and seismic activity that curves up from New Zealand along the east coast of Asia and down the west coast of the Americas. Collisions between the South American and Nazca tectonic plates created Chile's Andes Mountains and still cause quakes today.

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